“I should hope not indeed! Listen, Belle! I am asking no questions, and I don’t mean to spy on you, but I fancy you meet more men than your Mama or I know of. Before you decide to lose your absurd heart to one of them, consider whether you would care to present him to me, or to Adrian.”
“And if I would not, will he be the wrong sort of man?”
“Well, I’ll do that,” promised Miss Ravenscar, brightening. “It will be a very good kind of a game!”
Her brother drove her home, feeling that the morning had not been wasted.
He dined at Brooks’s that evening, and played faro afterwards, at the fifty-guinea table. When he rose from it, shortly after midnight, he saw that Ormskirk had walked into the cardroom, and was standing watching the fall of the dice at the hazard-table. Ormskirk looked up quickly as Ravenscar put back his chair, and moved across the room towards him.
“I thought you visited Brooks’s as seldom as I visit White’s,” remarked Ravenscar.
“Quite true,” Ormskirk drawled. “You, I fancy, came to White’s the other evening merely to find me.”
Ravenscar lifted an eyebrow.
“I,” said Ormskirk, flicking a speck of snuff from his sleeve, “came to Brooks’s in the hopes of finding you, my dear Ravenscar.”
“Ought I to be flattered?”